Celebrating Earth Hour is the best in the dark, and even better at the darkest place in the world.
On the fourth Saturday of March, we celebrate Earth Hour, a global event whereby people worldwide turn off their lights for one hour to show their support for the environment and raise awareness about climate change. Earth Hour began in 2007 and has since grown into a global movement, with millions of people participating in over 180 countries around the world, making it one of the world’s biggest environmental movements.
Turning off our lights for one hour allows us to conserve energy, think about our carbon footprint, and enjoy the darkness around us. For those living in and around a city, you’ve probably rarely experienced true darkness. We are consistently surrounded by artificial lighting, human-made light sources designed to illuminate indoor or outdoor spaces.
Although artificial lighting provides us with visibility and safety, there are high energy costs associated with it. When artificial lights are not properly directed or shielded, a significant amount of light is wasted by scattering into the atmosphere. Artificial lighting may disrupt photosynthesis and the activities of insects, birds, and other animals. Moreover, it makes it extremely hard to experience the world’s natural beauty at night. On a clear night in the city, compared to the darkest place in the world, you might only be able to see half a dozen stars.
There are places around the world where there is no artificial lighting and experience starry skies at night. The darkest place in the world (or one of them, anyway) is the Atacama Desert in Chile. The desert spans a narrow strip along the western edge of the Andes Mountains, extending from the border with Peru in the north to the region of Coquimbo in the south.
The Atacama Desert is the driest nonpolar desert in the world. It is also the only hot true desert to receive less precipitation than polar deserts and the largest fog desert in the world. Because of its unique properties, the Atacama Desert has been used as an experimentation site for Mars expedition similarities.
Moreover, the Atacama Desert is among the best places for stargazing because of its high altitude (ranging from 1000 to 6000 meters), nearly nonexistent cloud cover, dry area, and lack of radio interference and light pollution. The combination of high altitude and low humidity contributes to minimal atmospheric water vapor, reducing the amount of light scattering resulting it its notoriety as the darkest place in the world. Hundreds of thousands of stars can be seen in this area during the 200 cloudless nights each year.
The darkest place in the world is home to several world-class astronomical observatories, including the La Silla Observatory and the Paranal Observatory. The HARPS spectrograph found at La Silla was used to detect the first rocky exoplanet in its star’s habitable zone. It has also been used to find planets orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the Sun.
It is hopeful to know that there are still places around the world that exist without light pollution and artificial lighting. And while you may not be able to travel to the darkest place in the world during Earth Hour, there are still many ways for you to celebrate and reduce your impact. Some examples include:
- Turning off all your lights for one hour at 8:30 pm.
- Organizing an Earth Hour event in your community.
- Going on a night cycle or night run.
- Having a candlelit dinner.
- Going for a walk and spot the landmarks taking part in Earth Hour.
Whether you are at the darkest place in the world or not, Earth Hour is a way to think about our impact on the environment and come up with ways to minimize light pollution so that we can experience the true night sky all around the world.